Political Scene: Obama’s Disappointing Speech

“Disappointing.” That was the general consensus on President Obama’s speech on the Middle East yesterday, which Steve Coll, Wendell Steavenson, and Hendrik Hertzberg discuss on this week’s Political Scene podcast. Steavenson, who is based in Cairo and called in from Jerusalem, said that Egyptians and Israelis “were looking for something stronger, more solid, perhaps even more emotional.”

Coll called it “lawyerly,” and said, “It was responsive to the true complexity of the Middle East, but not inspiring for being so.”

In some sense I imagine he thought, in a professorial way, he was providing a thorough, deep, sophisticated, nuanced explanation of why the United States tolerates the King of Bahrain when he cracks down on his majority population but celebrates the overthrow of Mubarak—and he did so. It was a sophisticated, nuanced, measured explanation of an inconsistency that is really indefensible, if you’re the President of the United States.

Hertzberg’s disappointment with the speech stemmed mostly from Obama’s failure to put forward a plan of action, he said—“something like appointing Hillary Clinton to lead the negotiations” between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Steavenson said that some people in Jerusalem echoed Benjamin Netanyahu’s anger with Obama’s suggestion of creating a Palestinian state using the 1967 borders, but that others “were pleased that he had recognized explicitly the Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland.” She also noted that the “the language and the spirit of the revolutions that came off Tahrir, in Egypt, and Tunisia and elsewhere, the idea of peaceful protests,” may be leading to a “different paradigm” in the Israel-Palestine fight:

Instead of leaving it up to the leaders to argue about and to redraw maps, it feels like to some extent there might be a shift from the Palestinian people into a more kind of democratic process.

“It’s been clear, at least to me, for decades,” Hertzberg said, “that if the Palestinians were to discover nonviolence, if they had discovered it a few decades ago, they’d have long had a state by now. A nonviolent Palestinian movement is—if I were Netanyahu, that’s what I would fear the most.”

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